“INTERNATIONAL DADAISM MONTH”

Office of the Mayor

Proclamation

Lawrence, Kansas

WHEREAS: Dadaism is an international tendency in art that seeks to change conventional attitudes and practices in aesthetics, society, and morality; and

WHEREAS: Dadaism may or may not have come into being in the summer of 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire at 1 Spiegelgasse in Zürich, Switzerland, with the participation of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Marcel and Georges Janco, Jean Arp, and Richard Heulsenbeck; and

WHEREAS: The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; and

WHEREAS: Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions; and

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis “Boog” Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, April 1, March 28, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006 as

Jean Baudrillard

Our reality: that is the problem. We have only one, and it has to be saved. "We have to do something. We can't do nothing." But doing something solely because you can't not do something has never constituted a principle of action or freedom. Just a form of absolution from one's own impotence.

kill ugly radio: Philip K. Nixon has a Dream...

HERBERT SPENCER

"There is a principle which is proof against all information, which is proof against all arguments, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance; that principle is contempt, prior to investigation."

James Curcio (probably)

"We live in a world where what we know doesn't correspond to what we experience, and what we experience does not correspond to what we 'know' others experience. I think that's part of the reason why the conspiracy theory is so popular right now--because the linear-minded monkey is so popular right now--because the linear-minded monkey is prone to assume that 'the truth is out there' and that someone must be pulling the strings. To be honesy, I don't believe this. No person or organization is pulling the strings. That's what MHB is all about; hive mind works without any observable decision-making on any level."

Bill Hicks

Carl G. Jung

There was once a queer old man who lived in a cave, where he had sought refuge from the noise of the villages. He was reputed to be a sorcerer, and therefore he had disciples who hoped to learn the art of sorcery from him. But he himself was not thinking of any such thing. He was only seeking to know what it was that he did not know, but which, he felt certain, was always happening. After meditating for a very long time on that which is beyond meditation, he saw no other way of escape from his predicament than to take a piece of red chalk and draw all kinds of diagrams on the walls of his cave, in order to find out what that which he did not know might look like. After many attempts he hit on the circle. 'That's right,' he felt, 'and now for a quadrangle inside it!'--which made it better still. His disciples were curious; but all they could make out was that the old man was up to something, and they would have given anything to know what he was doing. But when they asked him: 'What are you doing there?' he made no reply. Then they discovered the diagrams on the wall and said: 'That's it!'--and they all imitated the diagrams. But in so doing they turned the whole process upside down, without noticing it: they anticipated the result in the hope of making the process repeat itself which had led to that result. This is how it happened then and how it still happens today.

Dr. Christopher Hyatt

A good Student will immediately understand.. that much of what he has called 'failure' is truly pre-potent success. This is particularly true when the Student can write his 'autobiographies' with complete dispassion. Every autobiography is nothing more than a story of destruction and decay. Whether a force is ultimately positive or negative doesn't matter, for it sets in motion other forces over which the magician has little or no control. This form of Chaos is desired since unknown results lead to more Toxicity and Chaos. Toxick Magicians have been called the 'Children Who Hate.' And, if the truth be known, they do. They hate stupidity, death and restriction. They loathe the idea of linear time.

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

"I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.

philip k dick

Larry Beinhart

"John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who invented the idea of deficit spending to stimulate the economy, especially at times of high unemployment. The method he recommended was investment in public works, which would employ people--immediately solving the unemployment issue--who would then have money to spend, and the aggregate total of spending and consumption would increase, boosting the entire economy."That's demand-side economics."Supply-side economics is the Republican inversion of the idea. It is that you give the money to the investing class and they will supply more things which the unemployed will want so much that they will... they will... rob convenience stores to obtain them."

Henry V. Miller

Though we no longer believe in alchemy, our age is nevertheless the one in which the art of transformation manifests itself in every realm. Almost everything we touch, eat, drink, smell has undergone an amazing process of transmutation. Everything we have learned about the "secret processes" derives from a study of nature. From eternity nature has been transforming everything--always in terms of a richer, more complicated life. In studying nature's ways we observe that everything is necessary and indispensable, or, as the mystics put it, that "everything has been given." Man can not alter nature, try as he will. He is not even able to subdue or chasten her. He can merely quicken or retard her processes. Despite himself, despite his petty, vain will, I mean, he is obliged to act in conformity with her laws. The more closely he studies her ways, the more obedient he becomes, the better and speedier his results.

There is a cosmic elasticity, if I may call it such, which is highly deceptive. It gives man the illusion, for a time, that he has the power to alter things. In the end, however, he is always brought back to himself. There, in his own nature, is where transmutation may be practiced, where indeed it should be practiced, and nowhere else. And when man perceives the truth of this he becomes reconciled to all apparant evil, ugliness, falsehood and frustration; thenceforth he ceases to impose upon the world his private picture of grief and woe, of sin and corruption.

"[Gerald] Holton has discerned that the work of scientific creativity is shaped by clusters of presuppositions and 'gut' assumptions. He calls these gut assumptions 'themata': themes. For the most part themata are aesthetic qualities like the assumption that the universe is basically symmetrical, or the opposite assumption that it's asymmetrical...

"The cluster of themata differs from scientist to scientist, though most scientists doing what Thomas Kuhn has called 'normal' science share basically the same set of underlying assumptions. Scientists who end up revolutionizing their fields appear to have a collection of themata at variance in some significant ways with the theme clusters held by most of their colleagues.

a bit further along, after a discussion on the divergent world views of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schr0dinger, John Briggs returns to the themata concept again...

"Holton thinks the particular constellation of themata of a great scientist is like a fingerprint. 'When you have a scientific paper and you take off the names and ask what is this person preoccupied with, you can see the thematic fingerprints on it.' Holton calls these obstinately held constituents of the scientist's vision themata because they recur through history and the total number which have thus far appeared in science is really quite small--around one hundred, he believes. At different moments in history, different themes come to the fore. There is an old theme of a universe composed of four elements--air, earth, fire and water. This has recently reemerged in physics as the search to explain all phenomena in terms of four elemental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and the weak nuclear forces.

...

"RobertKeegan, whose research was influenced by Holton, examined in detail Charles Darwin's intense, lifelong commitment to certain themes. Keegan calls these themes 'thought-forms.' He says, 'The thought-form can be viewed as the incarnation of a theme within an individual.' For example, in his books, papers, and journals Darwin struggled for twenty years to give expression to the 'thought-form' (or theme) of gradualism--just as Einstein had worked all his life to give expression to his personal collection of themes which included continuum and invariance."

There is always the danger of confusing thematic analysis with something else: with Jungian archetypes, with metaphysics, with paradigms and world views. (It might well be that the latter twocontain elements of themata. But the differences are overwhelming. For example, thematic oppositions persist during “normal science,” and themata persist through revolutionary periods. To a much larger degree than either paradigms or world views, thematic decisions seem to come more from the individual than from the social surrounding.) - Gerald Holton -

Henry Miller - Money and How It Gets That Way

"To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money, or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?"

define fascism:

Henry Miller from 'Into the Future'

We are facing an absolutely new condition of life, one that is almost unbearable, at least for a sensitive being. That such an antagonism always existed I have no doubt: the artist was always in conflict with the world, with the world in which he found himself. The fact that there are artists means that life is well-night insupportable. And yet, in the past there was always a thread of communication between the sensitive and the insensitive. There were forms and symbols, mythologies which served as alphabets and which enabled the uninitiated to decipher the divine script of the artist. Today the very thread, language, seems to have snapped. Powerless to communicate his vision, the artist loses his belief in himself, in his role or mission. Whereas before his escape from the pain of living was through art, today he has no escape except to deny his own validity. Today all the hierarchies have broken down: in every field of human endeavor we are faced with chaos. There is no choice, only to surrender. Surrender to the flux, to the drift towards a new and unthinkable order.

Lord Acton

"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

heh

Book Review:

If you are a humanist, you will probably dig Man Without A Country. I’ve read the Amazonreviews and on other sites that take book reviews. I’m astounded by people who take offense to Vonnegut’s humanistic perspective. One reviewer below suggests that Man Without A Country contains talking points straight from the Democratic National Committee. I checked the DNC website and couldn’t identify any lines from Vonnegut’s book. So it goes.

Yes, Vonnegut draws connections between Bush and Hitler—they both called themselves Christians despite what many liberal documentaries suggest about Hitler being a pagan. But being opposed to Bush doesn’t make Kurt a Democrat. Read Kurt’s words, HE’S A HUMANIST. For those of you that are anti-humanists, there are plenty of sentences to be taken out of context to exploit towards your own divisive agendas. Vonnegut reminds us of a line by Shakespeare: “The Devil will quote scripture for his purpose.”

When did respecting each other become politically divisive? I’ve often wondered why respecting science is politically divisive. Kurt sheds some light on these topics among others.

Look, if you think the world is all hunky-dory, this won’t be your cup of tea. Or, if you dug Vonnegut’s earlier work solely for his humor, you may be disappointed with this read. Vonnegut grapples with his grasp on turning out humor, about how other humorists loose their humor as they age. Vonnegut still has his humor, but he is pissed off—many readers haven’t known when he has been joking and when he has been serious. For the remedial readers he annotates his jokes by saying, “I’m kidding.”

Just because Kurt loves humans, he isn’t beyond shaking his finger at those who preach love as they drop bombs and enslave little brown folks. If you object to this assessment of our current world order, and you have read the books Vonnegut suggests every non-twerp has read, then, I’m open to reading your objections to the content of Kurt’s assertions. Seriously, do you consume much non-American media?

Fellow humanists,it’s time to take these ideas seriously. Enough of the politicians spewing their intellishit. Kurt begins his penultimate book: “There is no reason good can’t triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.”

Here’s to Bokonon. * Kurt, I look forward to reading your next novel. I hope you do find a way to write it’s ending.

Cindy Bertrand Holub

"We know that throughout American history others have had to struggle to gain acknowledgment of their civil rights, and now it is our turn. The half-century- old system of sealed adoption records must end and our right to records of our own births restored. As long as this system based on secrecy and lies continues to exist, an aura of shame will cling to adoption."

John Peret

"I stand here before all of you gathered here today as a criminal, and I'm currently serving a life sentence. Law mandates this sentence, and it takes effect on people like myself the minute I'm born... My only crime, in this supposed "free" society, was being born, and then surrendered to the closed adoption system. For my crime, I have to live a life separated from my heritage, medical history, biological relatives, and most information about myself that a non-adopted person takes for granted everyday of his or her life."

Know Thine Enemies - Copyright 2003 Bastard Nation

"As ultraconservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and Family Research Council heavily promote adoption as a primary remedy to a gallery of perceived social ills, large constituency churches (including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [Mormons]) and their auxiliary organizations, including church oriented social service agencies and crisis pregnancy centers, have entered the adoption industry to facilitate their theologically based social policies. Honing the existing rhetoric of the industrial lobbyists like the NCFA, these theological opponents of adoptee rights pose as our greatest potential opponents due to their extensive grassroots penetration and their enormous fundraising capabilities."

Making the Decision to Search by Shea Grimm

In the event that you decide to search, you might experience an emotional rollercoaster (which will be discussed in depth in future posts), you might alienate your family, friends, or significant other. You might encounter something totally unexpected and wonderful, or unexpected and devastating. Search is never something to be entered into lightly, as Lifton says in "Lost and Found", "Although one is never *totally* prepared, one should not tamper with the Search until one cannot do otherwise." (p.77). Heed this warning well.

History of the NCFA: by Shea Grimm.

"The year was 1978, Carter was in the White House, and sealed record systems were firmly entrenched worldwide, but most particularly in the U.S. Carter convened a panel of independent experts in the field of child welfare to address the issue of 'special needs' adoption, and to draft some model state legislation. The panel instead came up with a Model State Adoption Act that threw open records to adult adoptees, and instructed adoption agencies to serve as intermediaries in searches by birthparents for their adopted children.... In response to this legislation... it was the Edna Gladney Home, an agency in Fort Worth Texas, who went to its supporters, comprised mainly of adoptive parents, to raise money for a lobbying organization to defeat the open records provisions of the Model State Adoption Act. The result was the National Committee for Adoption. The NCFA and at its helm, William Pierce, convinced Senators such as John Tower and Jeremiah Denton to argue that open records threatened adoption, and when Reagan took over the White House, the original Model State Adoption Act had been supplanted by an anemic version that did away with the open records provisions, as well as many other reforms."

Adoption Nation by Adam Pertman

"The bias against adoptees is instituted immediately after they begin their new lives. Wherever they are born and whatever their ages when their adoptions are finalized, they become the only Americans to have their birth certificates sealed and replaced with official substitutes containing intentionally false information. All but a few states then forbid the adoptees from obtaining their original documents, except in exceptional circumstances."

Adoption Nation by Adam Pertman

"Adoptees can feel spiritually and emotionally wounded when they learn thier biological parents were shabbily treated or were manipulated into giving them up. That applies to thier fathers as well as thier mothers."

Louise Armstrong - Of Sluts & Bastards

"...The language of help and 'treatment' can be used to camoflage aggressive maltreatment and extreme cruelty, in comparison with which the placement of juveniles and 'offenders' in secure punishment facilities looks - if not benevolent - at least candid. In the correctional facility, at least the child is clear that she is being punished for what she has done. In the 'treatment' facility, she is being tormented for what she is..."...That the smoke screen of language can convince people that the abused child's 'disorder' requires the draconian environment of a locked and heavily guarded (by 'helping personnel') facility, is nothing short of extraordinary..."In many ways, the experience of 'treatment,' for the children, is akin to the experience of hostages: Stripped of their belongings, of anything familiar, they are subject to demands that they meet incomprehensible 'treatment goals'. They are required, in effect, to confess to thier shortcomings, incorrect attitudes, wrongdoings - in order to gain release. They are required to accept as truth (and appear to embrace) constant negative and critical appraisals. In short, they are held in captivity by adults who see them and treat them as though they were an inferior enemy..."The techniques used by staff are remarkably similar to those used by hostage takers as well: the threat of isolation; depersonalization; routine searches, not only of space but of mind. Kids are subject to the threat of bondage (termed 'restraint'). And the kids must submit to a regular litany of coerced call-and-response about their feelings and faults that amounts to brainwashing."Previously ordinary things, like listening to music, are held to be 'privileges' - earned by conformity and continuous confession..."

Lousie Armstrong, Of Sluts & Bastards

"...There is no such empirical evidence to tell us that confidentiality - certainly the total confidentiality that now obtains - is a good. There is plenty of evidence to tell us that it can be an evil, that the potential for that is extremely great. Particularly if the system is a compromise with basic tenets - both real and those to which we give lip service - on which our society is structured, it wants watching. Particularly since this is the state acting in the name of good intentions, it wants that old vigilance."

Nancy Verrier, The Primal Wound

"The feeling that life is unsafe and that he must be 'on guard' takes its toll. Part of that which might be sacrificed in ego development is a sense of spontaneity and carefree abandon... (impulsivity, common among adopted children, should not be mistaken fro spontaneity.)"

Nancy Verrier, The Primal Wound

"The need to be good often caused adopted children to be hypervigilant, which means that they are constantly assessing the 'climate' of the environment in order to know how to behave. They feel as if their security within the family requires it. This need to be vigilant in trying to determine what is expected of them feels like walking a tightrope or walking on eggshells to many adoptees."

Nancy Verrier, The Primal Wound

"The burden of trying to live up to some percieved expectations, whether real or imagined, may exacerbate the ambivalent feelings many adoptees already have toward their adoptive families and toward their adopted status in general."

Nancy Verrier, The Primal Wound

"...Too often misguided clinicians advise the parents to send the child to an adolescent treatment center or special school. They are completely unaware of the significance this solution has on the child. Whereas in some cases this may be the last resort and only thing to do, on the psychological level it only reinforces and exacerbates the abandonment issue for adoptees."

Nancy Verrier, The Primal Wound

Nancy Verrier, The Primal Wound

"The adoptee is paralyzed by the belief that he was responsible for his own abandonment because he wasn't a good enough baby to keep. By believing this, he is giving the mother who left him omnipotent wisdom in having made this decision, when she was actually a confused, vulnerable, and often very young person acting from fear or other people's advice..."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"In the course of interviewing adoptees, however, I realized that it is not just secrecy that affects their sense of self but rather a series of traumas. This 'cumulative adoption trauma' begins when they are separated from the mother at birth; builds when they learn that they were not born to the people they called mother and father; and is further compounded when they are denied knowledge of the mother and father to whom they were born."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"Natural children, who have parents, siblings, and other blood-related relatives, are grounded in a reality from which they can spin their images. But adoptees do not feel grounded or connected by any such reality. Much of their imagery is not centered on the adoptive family in which they live as if they belong, but rather in fantasy and imagination. They have a sense that their very perceptions are deceiving them. They have lost the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is supposed to be real."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"...Lacking a sense of direction that would give purpose to their lives; as fluctuating between being extremely passive or self-destructive. Perhaps it is difficult for a male adoptee to be assertive in our competitive society when he doesn't have control of his own personal history."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"...Adoptees are usually shadowed by a pet of some kind, more than likely of unknown origins. They tend to identify with animals, perhaps because they share some state of grace that is outside the human condition... The live or stuffed animal grazes loyally in the interstices between them and the rest of the world... adoptees, of all ages, have live and inanimate animals to accompany them through life."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"...While most adoptees have no choice but to adjust to the condition of being cut off from their heritage, there are some who cannot control the inchoate rage caused by their feelings of rejection by the birth parents and the sense of powerlessness over their fate... in the case of adoptee murders, the catastrophic conflict arises out of the child's dissociated response to the trauma of separation from the mother and the secrecy about his origins."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"...What may be a simple threat to other acting-out adolescents - 'if you don't behave you're out of here' - may feel like the threat of annihilation to the adopted person, who is always fearful of fragmentation."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"I recognized the psychiatrist and minister as keepers of the establishment's percieved truths - one representing mental health, the other moral certitude. They were accomplices in keeping the adoptee aborted from the consciousness of his clan. They saw him not as the returned lost baby but as the returned dead, who seek vengeance."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"One of the many paradoxes in search and reunion is that adoptees often find their adoptive parents when they find their birth parents. Once the barrier of secrecy has been lifted, they are able to see their adoptive parents in a new way. They can share their feelings with them and open up communication channels that had been clogged by secrecy."

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self

"Adoptees must weave a new self-narrative out of the fragments of what was, what might have been, and what is. This means they must integrate their two selves: the regressed baby who was abandoned and the adult the baby has become."They must make the artificial self real, and allow the forbidden self to come out of hiding. They must integrate what is authentic in these two selves, and balance the power between them. It is during this period that the adoptee feels most vulnerable, because neither self is in charge."They must accept that they cannot be fully the birth parent's child any more than they could be fully the adoptive parents' child. They must claim their own child, become their own person, and belong to themselves."

Iris Murdoch

Charles deLint, Spirits in the Wires

"..It doesn't matter how happy your life is, if you don't know your parents - if you don't know anything about your origin - you're living with this black hole underlying who you are. And not all the platitudes in the world can make it go away."

R. "Bucky" Fuller

"The young realize, as thier elders do not, that humanity can do and can afford to do anything it needs to do that it knows how to do."Those who ignorantly think of themselves as a well-to-do conservative elite are, in fact, so slave-complexed that they are shocked when the younger generation throws aside thier clothes and cars of distinction and - abandoning their make-believe mansions which only are their old conqueror's castles - congregate in hundreds of thousands in shameless, innocent bands on vast beaches and meadows. It is not an unspannable generation gap that has occured, but an emancipation of youth from yesterday's slave-complex reflexes. This has been brought about solely by the proliferation of knowledge. 'The medium is the message' is the message only of yesterday's middleclass elite."